Saturday, February 21, 2009

All the ingredients are sitting in my kitchen, but with hubby's birthday and an last week's TWD cake combined with my morning sickness - there's no way on this planet I am baking anything right now. I can't even cook dinner because just being around food makes me queasy. Hopefully by next time I'll be back to normal.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Wow, you just don't realize you have an addiction until you are yanked, torn, dragged away from it with no allowed use for several days. My goodness! I feel like I've been living in the dark ages, and that notion, in all reality, is quite silly, BUT it doesn't make it any less true. My hard drive died (again - this time by human fault not computer malfunction) and I was without a computer for 4 days! Holy batman that's a long time!!

So, my TWD almost didn't happen....again. See, when you discover, much to your jaw dropping surprise that, oh, just say for the heck of it, you're pregnant....AGAIN, and morning sickness has kicked in full force, food, in general sounds horrific. So, baking, cooking, eating - anything to do with food at all just doesn't sound appealing.

But, I pressed on because I'd been DYING to try this cake for some time now.

I had a couple of issues -

I could not get the temperature of the boiling sugar about 220 degrees. Not sure what happened but I let it sit there quite some time - maybe my thermometer is broken, I'm not sure.

The cake turned out awesome but the frosting, not as fantastic. The frosting as soon as it was done tasted like - well, hubby said it tasted like cough medicine. BUT we persevered, put it on the cake and put it in the fridge for an hour, and afterwards, the frosting lost that weird aftertaste.

Overall, not as good as I hoped but not as bad as I thought it would be when I first tasted the frosting. I would definitely make the cake again, but use a different frosting though. I really can't wait to see how other people fared!

Okay - so, this picture makes it look a bit worse than it actually was!! I had just cut a super tiny slice for one of my little ones and it smashed down part of my cake. With that being said, it's easy to see that my cake was a far stretch from the cover of our cooking bible. Yes, I still have a looong way to go, but it was still fun to make!

Also - my hubby is having a birthday this week and his two favorite cakes are Champagne cake and black forest cake so if any of you know of any good recipes, please let me know!!

Monday, February 9, 2009

Ahhh - - - another round of dr. appts. and one of my babies has a bladder infection, plus more dr. appts. for me today and tomorrow. I will be making floating islands hopefully tomorrow =) I can't wait to read everyone's stories in the meantime.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

YUMMM!! These cookies were so freaking good. I'm a salty sweet snack kind of girl, so this week promised to carve a special little spot in my heart. Please go to Jess at cookbookhabit for the recipe! Thanks for the great pick this week!

Take Child #2 to dr. for ear infection. Get home, notice goop in eye, suspect pink eye but refuse to drive 45 minutes back to dr.

Husband - stomach flu and I sleep (if you can call it that) on the couch.

Saturday:

I am now on day 3 of less than 4 hours of sleep. My throat starts to hurt. Child #3 still very sick, though no longer throwing up. Intuition waves a flag, I listen. Hubby takes him to doctor - immediately pointed to ER. After several long hours at ER child #3 comes home with pink eye and VERY bad strep throat.

Sunday:

Hubby and I go to dr. We both have strep. Sunday night Child #1 complains of sore throat --yep, strep.

Yes, waaay more than you wanted to know, I'm sure. But, now you see how important it was to me to make my cookies - the recipe sitting there teasing me all weekend. Finally, today, after two naps, I started to feel like a human being again, my kids were bouncing off the walls and feeling better, so I pulled up my sleeves, scrubbed my hands and dug in.

I only had bittersweet chips and they weren't mini's. I didn't care. I was also terrified that they'd turn out like my lime meltaways which were an abysmal disaster. I've been so traumatized by that cookie mess that I've not dared another refrigerator cookie recipe. Oh no, no way. After reading other reviews, I froze the dough and promptly forgot about it for two hours.

My cut frozen dough:

My cookies right out of the oven - hmm - weird shape:

I cut them and had no issues with crumbling and cooked them. They didn't melt into nothingness!!!!!! OMG, I was so happy.

The result:

One of my favorite kinds of cookie - the salt is just a tease and you can tell it's there but it doesn't take over the other flavors. I absolutely love these and are my favorite Dorie recipe so far!!!